A tipster shared this listing (PDF
here) for 137 Second Ave., a landmarked building between St. Mark's Place and Ninth Street that has been on the rental market this winter.
A few notes for the 21,896 square feet that spans four levels:
• Possession November 2018
• Completely Renovated
• Fully Wired
• Move-in Ready
• Great for HQ Building
• Short Walk from 6, R and W train
There isn't any mention of the asking rent for the neo-Italian Renaissance brick building, the former German Dispensary, which opened in 1884. (In 1905 it became the Stuyvesant Polyclinic.)
Here's more about the building in this 2008
New York Times feature:
Like the branch library next door, the Second Avenue building of the German Dispensary was the gift of Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer, who ran the German newspaper New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung. That journal had great influence in Little Germany, on the Lower East Side around First and Second Avenues below 14th Street. The 1886 edition of Appleton’s Dictionary of New York described an area in which “lager-beer shops are numerous, and nearly all the signs are of German names.”
And...
In more recent years — until its sale [in 2008] — the old dispensary building was part of Cabrini Medical Center. Although hospitals are notoriously hard on historic architecture, the interior of the Schickel building was remarkably intact, if run-down, with intricate stairway ironwork and door enframements, red marble wainscoting and a highly colored tile floor.
In 2008, a British consulting firm called
?What If! bought the building for $13 million. Following the sale, the firm hired architects David Mayerfield Associates to restore both the interior and exterior.
Per a feature at
Daytonian in Manhattan:
When dropped ceilings in the main hall were removed, the 1884 skylights, blacked out in World War II, were rediscovered. Similarly, stained-glass panels in the ceiling of the staircase were uncovered. The colorful encaustic tile floors had been covered over with concrete which was meticulously scraped away.
The building was designated a New York City Landmark in 1976. Learn more about the building's history and architecture at Off the Grid
here.
